The Matter of Memory: On Semblance and History in Richter and Adorno
by Anthony J. Cascardi
© Anthony J. Cascardi
There are few contemporary artists whose technical abilities and range can compete with Gerhard Richter’s. Richter’s sheer proficiency as a painter has earned him access to the full spectrum of contemporary artistic styles, from photo-realism and abstract expressionism to landscape painting and watercolors. The body of Richter’s work confirms the views of philosopher-critic Arthur Danto about contemporary art, though in surprising and controversial ways. Danto offered the striking insight that contemporary art is defined by the fact that its scope cannot be defined; his slogan epitomizing this situation is that, in contemporary art, “anything goes.”1 Richter, for his part, presents us with the example of a painter who can seemingly do anything, even if he does not in the end do everything. And yet his astounding technical facility, and the range of his commitments, raise important questions that a thinker like Danto does not take into account. What if the challenges and the predicament of contemporary art were not the result of an expansion of its compass but of the fact that art had reached a point where all the technical demands that it once found meaningful seemed to have been met? What if the crisis in the contemporary conception of art had come about because art’s technical accomplishments had undermined its sense of purpose? If anything can in principle be done–in both the “theoretical” and technical senses--then how is an artist to decide what to do?2
When looking at the body of Richter’s work on such occasions as the 2002 MOMA retrospective (“Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting”3), the matter of his technical proficiency and range might also raise questions about its coherence and consistency. Indeed, Richter’s long-time friend, the critic Benjamin Buchloh, said to Richter that some commentators had come to regard him as “a painter who knows all the tricks and techniques, and who simultaneously discredits and deploys all the iconographical conventions.... This makes you particularly attractive to many viewers because your work looks like a survey of the whole universe of twentieth-century painting, presented in one vast, cynical retrospective.”4 But how might one speak of an aesthetic conviction, as opposed to a dilettantish cynicism, in the case of an artist whose work ranges so widely and freely between the figurative and the abstract, the intellectual and the perceptual–between demonstrations of painterly energy (e.g. in the “squeege” paintings) and works that reference the disciplined realism of photography, or between the paintings that seem to elicit a purely optical interest (e.g. “4 Panes of Glass,” 1967, or the color- chart paintings, which include “256 Colors,” 1974, and “Six Colors,” 1966) and those that entice the eye in order to deny it the satisfaction of seeing anything clearly (especially the paintings that feature Richter’s famous “blur” effects)? What is the coherence of a body of work that incorporates such apparently contradictory approaches to painting and why, given Richter’s breathtaking competence and range, does he make the specific aesthetic choices he does? What are the through-lines that subtend the various arcs of his efforts?
In approaching Richter’s work it is useful to bear in mind both the many things that modern art has wished itself to be, as well as those things it has wished itself not to be. Foremost among both of these is photography. Indeed there are good reasons to believe that painting’s principal struggle, whether imaginary or real, since the beginning of the 20th century, has been with the achievements of photography: photography seemed to offer the highest possible degree of “technical” proficiency, at least as far as the realistic representation of reality was concerned. In fact, it has sometimes been said that once the techniques of photography became widely available for use as art, the purpose of painting had to be re-conceived, because to continue to think of painting as aiming at the representation of reality would mean acknowledging its defeat by this new medium. But what could painting then be? The answers were far from clear. The nearest alternative account of painting, an older one in fact, that painting was a form of expression rather than of representation, could hardly stand up in light of the directions that painting in the late 20th century did in fact take. For one thing, there were just too many painting practices--minimalism, constructivism, and geometrical abstraction to name just a few–that could not easily be understood within the framework of an expressivist language. Second, painting’s adventures beyond the conventions of the flat canvas were more about its exploration of new aesthetic media and their limits than they were about expression. And finally, it was far from clear that painting was ever quite ready to set aside its ambitions to render a likeness of the world, in spite of photography’s success. Painting had long been conceived as the making of an image of the world--as a form of semblance—and for much of its history “semblance” was understood to mean “resemblance.” Indeed, resemblance had established itself as the normative form, the “truth” of semblance, beginning in the early Renaissance. In spite of sustained efforts during the 20th century to jettison that normative history, the fact of the matter is that figural painting survived long after the invention of photography and, perhaps even more surprisingly, long after various forms of non-figural painting seemed to have won the day. Ample testimony of the persistence of figural painting was presented in an international exhibit organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the same year as the MOMA Richter retrospective--“Cher Peintre, Lieber Maler, Dear Painter”--showing works by Francis Picabia, Bernard Buffet, Sigmar Polke, and Alex Katz, among others. The important question is not the survival of figural painting, but rather in what forms did it survive, and in what relationship to the prior history of its own ambitions to render a likeness of the world? As far as Richter is concerned, it would be far more accurate to speak of a struggle between the ambitions of painting and the lure of photography, and about the ability of painting to render a kind of truth that eludes the photographic image as it is narrowly conceived, rather than about the displacement of the one by the other. Between painting and photography, as between contemporary figural painting and its own past, Richter explores contested claims over such things as truth and history, the truth of history, and the role of art in mediating our memory of the past.
Now, what “history” means for Richter is far from clear, much less painting’s relationship to it. Indeed, when it comes to some of his most powerful works–the series of images of the Baader-Meinhoff Group entitled October 18, 1977, for instance--Richter has indicated that his aims were neither topical nor political. Indeed, he has sometimes gone so far as to disavow his interest in most of the questions of history. When asked explicitly about the October 18, 1977 series, for example, he said that while these works may give rise to “questions of political content or historical truth... Neither interests me.”5 Still it can be argued that such works fall within the genre of history painting (its post-history, perhaps), and that Richter’s deeper concerns are with those aspects of history that involve something other than the accurate representation of the “facts.” (Just what that “something other” might be remains to be identified.) Whereas Buchloh has argued that these paintings illustrate the impossibility of history painting in the contemporary world, I tend to concur with Robert Storr in saying that they show how the genre of history painting continues to remain viable, albeit in a transformed mode.6 What these paintings show is that if history painting was to go on, it would have to refuse any aspiration to tell of collective glories or of heroic deeds; it would have to renounce the ambition to locate great suffering within the framework of some redemptive narrative. If such painting was in the end part of any grand narrative, that was a story more driven by prior traumas than by the prospect of future redemption. In addition, these works suggest that history painting had to become extremely circumspect about any desire to record a definite “truth” about facts or events. Richter’s version of history painting is neither heroic nor positivist; it is something quite different, not least of all because it works tirelessly to isolate figures from narratives and to block any direct access to the “events themselves.”
I will say more about this vision of history in the context of some further remarks about memory, time and trauma below. My hope in so doing is to establish a set of contrasts between Richter’s use of the blur as an essential ingredient in art’s engagement with history and Adorno’s outline of the relationship between art and truth as described by art’s semblance quality. But first I would observe that while the October 18, 1977 series was the first instance in which Richter turned directly to contemporary history, his critical engagement with the presuppositions of history painting both precedes these images and reaches well beyond them. Storr points out that Richter’s works from the 1960's include a number of images that have clear historical implications: a 1962 head of Hitler haranguing a crowd, the picture of an SS doctor who had lived quietly in post-Nazi Germany until he was exposed in 1959, pictures of military aircraft, and the signal work of 1965, “Uncle Rudi,” which offers the smiling portrait of an average Wehrmacht “‘soldier in the family’” (Storr, p. 250). Together with the October 18, 1977 series, this group of images helps remind us of the fact that it is precisely in thinking about the relationship between art and history–and likewise, between history and art–where Richter appeals most powerfully to the effects of the “blur.”
And yet these “blur” effects are notoriously difficult to locate, much less to interpret. Their appearance is hardly limited to the “history” paintings, and for that reason they raise some fundamental questions about the relationship between the medium of painting and its subject matter. Should the “blurs” be thought of as happening on the surface of Richter’s paintings, standing as traces of the process of their fabrication? Or are they to be located on a more conceptual plane and regarded as a function of the artist’s attempt to register the difficulty of rendering the world as seen? There does not seem to be a single answer. In a wide number of Richter’s canvasses the “blur” seems indeed to be a function of the material surface, and asks to be traced to the activity of painting as such. Richter’s so-called “squeegee” paintings are the most prominent instances. But in other very different works--“Cathedral Square, Milan” stands out among them, but also the images of the Baader-Meinhoff gang referred to above, for example--the blurring seems also to involve matters of perception and memory; it appears to be the effect of an effort at seeing that is brought to bear upon images that stand, as it were, just behind or underneath the blur, and somehow just out of reach. But what, then, of the paintings that seem to render images in near-perfect focus, and sometimes with a haunting hyper-clarity, where the “blur” seems to contribute to the impression of a photographical realism? In some of Richter’s most powerful works (e.g., “Reading,” 1994; “Two Candles,” 1982, and of course one of the subjects of the present volume, “Betty,” 1988) the blur suggests a close-up camera shot whose depth of field cannot quite hold all the parts of its subject in focus.
To address the non-figural works first, these might at first glance seem to conform to a modernist paradigm, where modernism is understood (1) as involving a self-questioning critique of the material means by which artworks are made; (2) as bringing to light the physical supports on which artworks rely (which serve, so to speak, as their material “assumptions”); and (3) as raising questions about what is essential to the continuation of art and what is not. This is the line of thinking about modernism that is most closely associated with the criticism of Clement Greenberg, and it certainly seems to hold true for a significant body of works, most importantly for the New York-based genres of abstract expressionism and minimalism. But when Richter paints with a squeegee, he seems to be exercising a degree of confidence about painting that had already been won by modernism’s self-questioning; indeed, his point of departure is the premise that there are no tools and techniques essential to painting (cf. Danto, “anything goes”), which is to say that whatever is at stake in art is not essentially a matter of the adequacy or limits of its materials, even though its materials may well be indispensable to it. If Richter has doubts, and if some variety of skepticism is relevant to his work, this is not about the essence or existence of painting as such. Richter’s “squeegee” paintings are vastly different from the surfaces of modernist paintings in this respect. They certainly call attention to their own effects, but not in order to struggle against the surface as a limiting material factor. (Richter has not, to my knowledge, ventured into sculpture or any other three-dimensional art.) The surface of the canvas is itself a place of drama and engagement, and the stakes involved in this drama are something other than the fate of art as a material practice. Indeed, I would argue that the surfaces of Richter’s more abstract paintings are the places where the materiality of paint and the physical limits of the surface encounter the movement of time. That time and motion are crucial factors for Richter can be directly gleaned from such crucial works as “Ema (Nude on a Staircase)” (1966) and “Woman Descending the Staircase”(1965), which very clearly invoke Duchamp, as well as “Ferrari” (1964), which obviously references speed. Some sort of movement in time also seems to be involved in producing the blur that appears in “Administrative Building” (1964). Likewise, in some of Richter’s most important non-figural works, the dragging of the squeegee leaves traces that tell principally of time: of motion extended in space over points that are non-coincident with themselves. These abstract paintings are instances in which the modernist imperative to look at the material surface of the work (rather than past or through it) yields something other than what the material surface itself presents, in part because the material is temporally, and not merely spatially, extended. Moreover, the attempt to look at the material medium of the painting is thwarted in the crucial places where surfaces meet. These are precisely the points where Richter repeatedly subjects the image-surface to acts of erasure. Consider the places where surfaces meet in a work like “Helga Matura with her Fiancé” (1966), which depicts an apparently impossible conjuncture in more than just he physical sense; or the shadow cast by the leg in “Ema” as the figure descends the staircase. These are all cases where the material in question is not identical to itself, indeed, in which the material of painting seems to be not entirely present to itself.
Insofar as the overall effect of the non-figural works is thus neither to represent nor simply to present, they can be thought of as instances of pure semblance; they resemble nothing other than themselves, and yet they do so by being nowhere identical to themselves. Hence Richter’s interest in establishing the non-uniformity of the surface of his non-figural works in differentiating the surface from itself even as he recognizes its continuity in space and time. Consider the “Abstract Pictire/Abstraktes Bild” of 1992 in this regard, as well as “Gray Streaks” (1968), and the liquid image “Detail (Brown)” (1971).7 “Semblance” (Schein) is a term I borrow from Adorno, who invoked it in the Aesthetic Theory in order to describe the truth of art.8 While acknowledging, in thoroughly modernist fashion, that artworks are at bottom artefacts, Adorno located one of the great paradoxes of aesthetics in the fact that art offers us something that is at once made and true. “The metaphysics of art,” he wrote, “revolves around the question of how something spiritual that is made, in philosophical terms something ‘merely posited’ can be true.”9 Adorno’s response to this puzzle turns on the conviction that what is made in art has the form of semblance; it is appearance rendered true. That must be claimed, validated, and redeemed by aesthetic theory is precisely the truth of semblance.10 But what is this truth? It must at bottom always be a claim about the image itself: art makes the claim that a given image (and I would include tactile and sound images as well as visual images) says or shows something true. And for Adorno this means principally that the artwork exhibits a truth in and through what is made: “the question of the truth of something made is indeed none other than the question of semblance and the rescue of semblance as the semblance of the true... Of all the paradoxes of art, no doubt the innermost one is that only through making, through the production of particular works specifically and completely formed in themselves, and never through any immediate vision, does art achieve what is not made, the truth” (AT, p. 131). As a form of semblance, art is an image or appearance which resembles nothing other than itself. “The mimesis of artworks,” he writes, “is their resemblance to themselves” (AT, p. 104).
Adorno’s notion of semblance points in many directions. One is toward the role that art has to play in recovering the residue that thought leaves unmastered and endowing its claims with validity. For Adorno, this residue is fundamentally and inevitably material. Materiality is, for Adorno, the site of non-identity, and it is through its material resources that art extends the work of “thought” by non-conceptual means. Several dangers nonetheless present themselves for any artist engaged in a project such as this. One is that of a lapse into a reductivism that equates the unmastered “residue” of thought with a literal conception of art’s materials. The other is that of falling into an uncritical romanticism, in which art’s access to the “unthought” is tinged with a combination of pathos and grandeur that is reminiscent of the sublime. (Richter seems to be sufficiently aware of both these risks and probes them deeply enough to be able to overcome them. His “Seascapes” of 1969 and 1970 are nothing if not an engagement with the tradition of the painterly sublime.) It is nonetheless tempting to believe, as some theorists following Adorno have suggested, that art’s attempt to recover and legitimate this material “residue” takes a direct and literal form. Among Adorno’s recent expositors, Jay M. Bernstein has been among the most emphatic in linking the ethical upshot of Adorno’s aesthetics to the direct recovery of these “material motives.” “Traditional works of art,” he writes (my emphasis) “are for the sake of ideas and ideals that were presumed to exist independently of the material formed. Modernist works, Adorno contends, enact a reversal in which form is for the same of what is formed; or better: the intelligibility of modernist works, the development of abstraction and negation, the role of dissonance in them, etc., all only makes sense if, apart from all intentions, modernism is dragged or pushed forward by a material motive that subtends all contesting ideal motives.”11
But, at least in Richter’s case, this “material motive” hardly leads to a condition in which artworks are simply identified with their materials--with “colors, paint-on-canvas, the rough brush stroke, the drip of paint” (Bernstein, p. 199). On the contrary, Richter’s interest in materiality leads to a recognition of what goes beyond its material resources. What Adorno names “semblance” is in this respect not unlike what Nietzsche described as the truth of appearances.12 Semblance is independent of resemblance and of the measure of truth that resemblance requires; it is free from the demand that a work look like any of the objects or states of affairs in which we have invested our conception of the “real” or the “true” precisely by showing that they are not the places where truth is held. But it is not, as for Nietzsche, a way of bringing of power into effect. For Adorno it is rather that artworks reflect critically on the truth of resemblance by producing the semblance of something that does not (yet) exist: a world of concrete concepts, of absolute sense. “Art desires what has not yet been, though everything that art is has already been. It cannot escape the shadow of the past.” He goes on to add the paradoxical caveat: “what has not yet been is the concrete” (AT, p. 134).
A work like Richter’s “Cow” (1964) affords some basic insight into one dimension of what Adorno means by the semblance-status of art. “Cow” sets the German word for cow (Kuh) next to the painted image of a cow. The work involves a literalization of the image and the imaging of a word. These twin gestures underscore the difference between painted image and written word as well as the fact that neither of the two yields the cow-in-itself. The latter point is particularly important in light of the fact that Richter could quite conceivably execute a work that would suppress its image-status and offer the “exact resemblance” of a cow. This painting makes its truth-claim neither by resembling a cow nor by denoting one, but by openly acknowledging the non-convergence of all of these. Whatever truth-claims it makes must be situated within the horizon of this awareness. Moreover, a relatively straightforward work like this shows that art is not just any kind of imaging but the making of semblance. Semblance is the means by which art gains access to the truth. “No artwork has content other than through semblance, through the form of that semblance” (AT, p. 107).
And yet in speaking of art as true semblance, and in charging it with the task of investing the appearing world with truth, as this particular Richter image seems to demonstrate, there remains the question of the relationship between the semblance quality of art, the appearing world, and history. I want to comment briefly on what Nietzsche and Adorno have to contribute to this question before turning back to Richter, whose work provides access to issues concerning memory, the accessibility of the past, and the difficulty of achieving clarity about the traumatic events that mark the end of modernity, all of which seem unavailable from the perspectives that Nietzsche affords. Indeed, Nietzsche’s relationship to history is largely bound up in the question of “overcoming.” For him, our relationship to the past is burdened by forms of resentment that can best be overcome by a supreme act of the will: by transforming the burden of the past through a will-to-power that says of the past: “I willed it thus.” For Adorno, no less than for Richter, history is significantly more resistant. For Adorno, history is sedimented in the present, and in more than one way. Insofar as all art is a social practice it is also a product of historically situated and conditioned labor; second, relatedly, art is a record of the suffering that is entailed by the ways in which sense and concept have come historically to have been split apart. The splitting of sense and concept within the context of modernity involves the concealment of labor; recovering labor means gaining access to the traces of suffering that are otherwise hidden in the processes of making. Labor is of course not just individual labor, and that itself is part of the problem: it no longer belongs to the individual and yet does not belong to the community. Labor in modernity is alienated labor. It is organized, as Marx saw, in ways that remove the individual worker from the products of his or her efforts. But the task of art cannot be simply to provide an alternative to alienated labor by a literal demonstration of, say, the role of the individual as craftsperson, or of art’s brute materiality. The role of art in modernity for Adorno is, rather, the critical one of making historical contradictions appear; this critical task in turn situates itself in between the romantic activity of remembering a lost unity of sense and concept and the hope for a utopian reconciliation between them, both of which it must deny as a sheer function of its historical situation.
Moreover, art at the end of modernity is faced with the additional challenge that to make anything poetic after Auschwitz would seem to be unthinkable. Hence Adorno’s famous pronouncement that “After Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to write poems.”13 This is because the aesthetic principle of stylization makes “an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed.”14 And yet Adorno himself recognizes that the horrific nature of this particular past does not render art altogether impossible. On the contrary, art is called upon to participate in the work of thinking against itself. Thus in a later statement Adorno said that “it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it” (“Commitment,” pp. 312, 318). But still there is more to be understood about the peculiar relationship between the present that follows after a traumatic past, which no act of protest or complaint can seem to reduce. To give an account of the particular historicity of the present requires acknowledging the fact that it is haunted by a traumatic past.
As I have suggested above, Richter’s work presents an understanding of the present in all its problematic relationship to the past, which is to say in a moment that has come to recognize itself as standing in relationship to modernity in some inescapable fashion, both as its aftermath or coda and as its reversal. If, as a post-modern painter, Richter is also a “history painter” it is by virtue of an inversion of one of the most basic premises about history itself, namely that it lies fully contained within the past. On the contrary, Richter is equally aware of the difficulty of “representing” the present and the past. This difficulty has to do equally with his understanding of the role of time and memory in constructing our relationship to the past and with his understanding of the uncontainable, hence unfinished, nature of the past as that which continues to trouble the present. Indeed, much of Richter’s work seems to suggest that the effort to see anything at all is dependent on the effects of time and memory; it is laden with the awareness that the reality of the present is as “historical” as the past. In the process, Richter establishes a series of powerful affinities between the past and present of personal memory and those moments and memories that are more aptly regarded as public in their nature and as collective in their scope. He establishes these connections, I want to suggest, because of his insights into what psychoanalysts have described as the “traumatic” structure of events.
In a NewYork Review of Books essay on Richter the critic Sanford Schwartz described Richter’s work as “an emanation of his life story.” But what life story, and what sort of emanation? The adjacencies between the personal and the political are powerful and suggestive, even if Schwartz winds up drawing what seem to me to be the wrong conclusions about Richter’s work. “Born in 1932, in Dresden, he spent nearly the first thirty years of his life living under dictatorships, first Hitler's and then, without a pause, that of Moscow's East Germany. When he and his first wife escaped to West Berlin, in 1961, months before the Wall was erected, he may already have had in him the beginnings of the working principles that form a backbone to his thinking. Ideology of any stripe was, understandably, the enemy. ‘I want to leave everything as it is. I therefore neither plan nor invent; I add nothing and omit nothing,’ he wrote in notes to himself dated 1964–1965 (and found in The Daily Practice of Painting, a collection of these notes and interviews). ‘I steer clear of definitions,’ he continued the following year. ‘I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty’”15
Schwartz’s account confuses the fear of ideology as a set of imposed views with the “indefinition” that is key to Richter’s most profound engagement with history. It de-couples the “uncertainty” of Richter’s “blur” from the effects of trauma and time that seem, in his works, to be haunting our engagement with the present and our recollection of the past. And in so doing it deprives that “life story” of some of its most essential ingredients, ingredients which would have been unavoidable for almost anyone of Richter’s time and place. The question for Richter was not just the narrative one of how to negotiate an individual sense of self in time, or how to carry out the role of an artist in relation to a past over which so many different parties might wish to claim (or to deny) authority, but how to do justice to the difficulty of remembering anything where the past in question is a traumatic one. If painting simply presented Richter with the problem of taking his distance from the past then it might be plausible to think, as Schwartz does, that Richter was fascinated by photography as a way to establish a non-assertive historical stance. But the supreme technical mastery which affords Richter the ability to compete with photography involves much more than a passive neutrality towards the world and still less the refusal of any technical aesthetic assertiveness.
Especially in works where Richter subjects some discernable image to the action of blurring, the task of painting, and its longstanding inclination to produce resemblances rather than semblances, is freighted with a highly charged past, in relation to which the personal and the collective cannot so easily be distinguished. This means, among other things, that it is indeed history that is being presented in Richter’s works, and that it is in fact history whose presentation is being resisted, refused or, as I will explain further below, delayed. It is as an engagement with history that Richter subjects the materiality of the surface to an encounter with time and its effects. This means, then, that Richter understands the consequences of time in terms that are not simply material but also existential and experiential. Painting is a form of work that happens not only with materials in space but in and through time; time confronts the painter with the need to remember and with the impossibility of forgetting; it implies history. The effect of the blur in this regard is to demonstrate that between us and history stands something other than representation; indeed, the effect of the blur is to suggest the problem of facing a present that is haunted by a past which cannot adequately be recalled.
One of Richter’s most powerful images, “Skull with Candle” (1983), illustrates the relationship between these questions and the problem of world-loss. Much as the figure in “Confrontation (3)” from the October 18, 1977 series, this particular work is as much about a world that it has turned away as it is about the conventional message of the memento mori. The rhetorical force of the baroque memento mori was to call for a remembering of the evanescence of the world; its work was to draw the viewer’s conscience away from the vanities of the “temporal” world by a paradoxically intense concentration of the gaze on the sensuousness of that very world. Its engagement with time was concentrated on the transitoriness of the material world, but its transcendental moral thrust was dependent upon a paradoxical indulgence in the sensuous, visible world. Perhaps it was in this way that it could best overcome the melancholia that was an equally prominent feature of the early baroque.16 It was, moreover, self-assured in its appeal to the faculty of memory as one of the three principal powers of the mind in the neo-Scholastic thought that propelled certain versions of the baroque. By contrast, Richter’s photopainting invokes a power of memory that is no longer certain of itself; it addresses a world that whose contents have been all-but evacuated of meaningful permanence.17 Because “Skull with Candle” reads as if it has been cropped (especially along the bottom edge, but also along the side) it is, as Gregg Horowitz has suggested, more like a photographic “slice” of a closed memory theatre than the visual reproduction of such a space. Moreover, the apparent emptiness of the remaining spaces in this image–the walls on which shadows are cast, for example–are blurred in such a way as to suggest that the effort to represent them can hardly be guaranteed success, indeed that seeing anything requires powers of retrieval and re-encounter that cannot be presupposed, even in spite of Richter’s technical proficiency. The world is not exactly present, but neither is it simply past. Rather, it seems as though the present carries with it the residue of a past that could not, as it unfolded, be fully assimilated by consciousness or experience. This is its “un-mastered residue.” Insofar as the work of painting is to represent the world as seen, it is subtended by an anxiety that is tethered equally to the work of memory and to the incompleteness of experience itself.
But why, and why this particular incompleteness? In one of his darker moods, Richter has said that “reality may be regarded as wholly unacceptable. (At present, as far back as we can see into the past, it takes the form of an unbroken string of cruelties. It pains, maltreats, and kills us. It is unjust, pitiless, pointless, and hopeless. We are at its mercy, and we are it.)”18 This view of the real acknowledges an un-assimilated remainder that cannot fully be captured by thought. The real is generated as much by the traumatic quality of past events (the “unbroken string of cruelties”) as it is by anything that may be operative in the present. Indeed, experience of the present--whether of suffering or of pleasure and beauty (and sometimes of the two mixed together)-- appears finally to be a delayed effect of past traumas. Richter’s painting is as much about the work of memory in the aftermath of a reality that is, in his words, “unjust, pitiless, pointless, and hopeless,” as it is about the “depiction” of suffering as it exists in the here and now. It is also about the difficulty of memory, which follows from the difficulty of witnessing, and about the delayed quality with which the unwitnessed past returns. Memory and experience are equally problematic for Richter because both are the products of events whose shape is fundamentally traumatic. While I would argue that the technique of the blur is the principal vehicle by means of which Richter enacts this difficulty, it also shows up in the posture and positioning of certain key figures in his work–as, for example in the way in which certain figures turn away from the viewer, as if to deny their participation in the fullness of the experience to which painting would summon them. In one such image, “I.G.” (1993) the figure is turned away and casts a near perfect shadow; in another more emphatic work of the same title the figure’s arm is raised across a lowered head, averting his gaze, as if to suggest without any hint of melodrama that seeing and being seen may simply be too difficult to bear. The aversion of this gaze, and its aversion to our sight, may be about the refusal to see and witness and about the refusal to be seen.
But what more precisely is trauma and what structure does it have? Recent work on Freud’s psychoanalytic theories have suggested that trauma is the site of events that cannot be assimilated either biologically or by consciousness as they occur. Traumatic events necessarily leave something un-mastered, but which returns after a delay in time. In a recent volume of essays on trauma, Cathy Caruth writes of the traumatic event as “not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.”19 It is characterized by a surprising combination of incompletion and literality: “It is this literality and its insistent return which thus constitutes trauma and points toward its enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming occurrence that then remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event.”20 It is this odd combination that can be seen at work in Richter’s paintings that deprive photojournalism of its reportorial accuracy in order to endow it with another kind of truth, the truth of history. Insofar as traumatic events cannot be assimilated within experience in its occurrence, they appear to have taken place without a witness. They are events that resist seeing in the conventional sense, much as way the figure turns away from the viewer in a work like Richter’s “Betty” involves something more than a coquettish avoidance of the viewer’s gaze. As psychiatrist Dori Laub writes of traumatic events that seem to haunt works like these, “it was also the very circumstance of being inside the event that made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist.... The historical imperative to bear witness could essentially not be met during the actual occurrence” (in Caruth, “Trauma and Experience,” p. 7). The traumatic re-experiencing of the event thus carries with it what Laub describes as the “‘collapse of witnessing,’ the impossibility of knowing that first constituted it” (“Trauma and Experience,” p. 10). If what follows from trauma is thus bound to be a symptom, it is not so much a symptom of the unconscious, whether repressed or in the mode of wish-fulfillment, but rather as a symptom of history (see Caruth, “Trauma and Experience,” p. 5).
Following more or less directly from this is the insight that the impact of the traumatic event lies in its belatedness. Traumatic events refuse to be located in the time or space of their occurrence, and yet make an insistent (re)appearance in some other place and time. Freud was especially concerned with the ways in which traumatic events do not allow for a simple or singular experience, but assume their force and meaning only through their temporal delay. “It is the fundamental dislocation implied by all traumatic experience that is both its testimony to the event and to the impossibility of its direct access” (Caruth, “Trauma and Experience,” p. 9). For Freud, “the traumatic nightmare, undistorted by repression or unconscious wish, seems to point directly to an event, and yet, as Freud suggests, it occupies a space to which willed access is denied. Indeed, the vivid and precise return of the event appears, as modern researchers point out, to be accompanied by an amnesia for the past” (Caruth, “Recapturing the Past,” p. 152).
This recent work in trauma theory suggests that while the ability to recover the past is paradoxically bound up with the inability to have access to it, there is at the same time an uncanny exactness associated with the memory of traumatic events. The strange connection between “the elision of memory and the precision of recall” was already central to Freud’s work, and was, even earlier, a feature of Pierre Janet’s writing.21 But recent theories have suggested that when trauma returns, it is often in the form of vivid flashbacks. Trauma is thus not simply “an overwhelming experience that has been obstructed by a later repression or amnesia”; rather, it produces an impossibility of telling (Caruth, “Recapturing the Past” pp. 152, 154): “the trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge ... and thus continually returns, in its exactness, at a later time” (“Recapturing the Past,” p. 153). Indeed, amnesia hardly implies an absence of memory, but rather a tension between the un-assimilated events and their powerfully uncanny return. This is precisely what disallows the “passivity” that Schwartz attributes to Richter’s work. Robert Storr seems to me to be closer to the mark when he describes a painting like “Uncle Rudi” (1965) as “a deliberately modest and richly ambiguous reminder of a past that people might prefer to forget” (Storr, Gerhard Richter, p. 250).
In light of the power of trauma, the “non-identity” associated with the blur in Richter’s works helps underscore an important difference between the way in which he engages the semblance character of art and what Adorno understands by that term. For Adorno, artworks sustain a utopian ambition, even in the face of the horrors of the past, by producing the semblance of something that does not (yet) exist. In the terms set forth in the Aesthetc Theory, this is a world of concrete concepts: “art desires what has not yet been, though everything that art is has already been. It cannot escape the shadow of the past. But what has not yet been is the concrete” (AT, p. 134). But Richter shows that the semblance-quality of art is hardly utopian at all. Indeed, his work finds very little space for what contemplating the “what might be” because it is so deeply involved in fathoming the relationship between the present and the past. Because time is one of its essential ingredients, and precisely because “future time” does not exist in any material form, art seems for Richter to be debarred from the prospective dynamic that Adorno posits for it. At least in the case of the works that feature the “blur” effects–both the ones that are principally figural and the ones that are “abstract”--the power of Richter’s work comes instead from the insight that the driving forces of semblance are history and time, and that traumatic histories occur without the possibility of a witness who could not, in the moment, attest to their truth. They offer proof, in the form of semblance, of a history to which nobody could simply attest, and yet which nonetheless returns to be seen.
University of California, Berkeley
NOTES
1. See “Anything Goes": The Work of Art and the Historical Future (Berkeley: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 1997); also available at http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=townsend.
2. Sanford Schwartz writing in the New York Review of Books proposes that “Richter truly holds radically diverse impulses within himself, and that there is something profound about his refusal to be categorized.” “The Master of the Blur,” New York Review of Books, 49, no.6 April 11, 2002. References are to the on-line version at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15242.
3. Ed. Robert Storr (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002).
4. Benjamin Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977,” October, 48 (Spring, 1989), 93.
5. Cited in Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), p. 256.
6. Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting, p. 256.
7. These are reproduced in Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting as follows: “Abstract Picture,” p. 269; “Gray Streaks” p. 155; “Detail (Brown)” p. 151.
8. One of the most thorough accounts of Adorno’s notion of “semblance” is that of Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
9. Aesthetic Theory (henceforth AT), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 131. See also AT, pp. 178-9. More than this, the artefact is an invitation to spirit: “spirit is that particular [thing] that makes an artefact art” (AT, p. 89).
10. Deleuze takes up this question in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin Boundas, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 253-266. Cf. Deleuze’s discussion of the simulacrum in relation to Lucretius and Epicurus (pp. 266-279).
11. See Jay M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 199; emphasis added.
12. For Nietzsche, it is the artists who are are the seekers after knowledge. Deleuze offers a valuable elaboration of this notion in Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See especially pp. 102-103.
13. Adorno, “After Auschwitz,” in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ahston (New York: Continuum Books, 1973), p. 362.
14. Adorno, “Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, Intro. Paul Ricoeur (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 313.
15. Schwartz, “The Master of the Blur,” at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15242.
16. See Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977).
17. Cf. Anselm Kiefer’s preoccupation with melancholia in the face of a very different aesthetic engagement with the consequences of the Second World War.
18. Richter, “Notes for a Press Conference, November-December 19879,” in Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Thames and Hudson and Anthony D’Offay Gallery, 1995), p. 174. Cited in Storr Doubt and Belief, p. 250.
19. Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 4.
20. Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma, p. 5.
21. Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” referencing van der Hart and van der Kolk, in Trauma, p. 153.